The European tradition traces the birth of its intellectual culture to the activity of an impertinent Athenian more than two millennia ago who decided to challenge the intellectuals of his day, not to a formal debate about their ideas but to an informal dialogue about how those ideas were formed and how their premises might hang together and produce meaning.
Socrates challenged (and seriously annoyed) the Sophists — the professional educators of his time — not through his own formal analysis but by doggedly developing his spirit of dialogue, compelling his interlocutors to examine and defend their ideas. His disciple, Plato, assumed the task of transcribing what he could remember from those dialogues and used the pretext to elaborate his own original ideas. He thereby established a literary tradition that continues to resonate across nearly two and a half millennia of Western philosophy.
Plato took a further step when he sought to perpetuate and enrich the Socratic tradition by founding his institution of learning, the Academy. Instead of simply formalizing and dictating to the Athenian youth his master’s wisdom, he continued to encourage Socrates’ methodology of dialectic. Plato’s star disciple, Aristotle, went on to imitate his master by creating his own school, the Lyceum. He became known as “the peripatetic,” a term associated with the Lyceum’s covered walkways. Later tradition connected this architectural feature with Aristotle’s practice of walking around the grounds with his students while teaching.
What has become of this tradition of dialogue? After several centuries of students attending lectures in university amphitheaters and more recently being invited to participate in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) in which lectures are recorded and the learning may take place thousands of kilometers away, we find ourselves musing over two questions: “Have we lost our way?” And “Can we or should we seek to find our way back?”
I had already initiated a fascinating dialogue with Claude concerning the role of Shakespearean soliloquy. I see it not only as a literary device but as a potential reflection of how ordinary people dialogue with themselves using their inner voice. Having already developed this discussion I offered a new prompt in which I shared the thoughts expressed above about the origins of Western philosophy, concluding with my questions about the prospect of reintroducing dialogue in our educational strategies. Claude predictably provided a lengthy and thoroughly reflective response.
Here is the first part of Claude’s response:
Your questions deserve a direct answer: Yes, we have likely lost something essential, and yes, we should seek to recover it—but not by going backward. The way forward requires recognizing what those ancient practices were actually doing and reimagining how to achieve those ends with the capabilities we now have.
What Was Lost
The progression you trace—from Socratic street corners to Plato’s Academy to Aristotle’s walkways to amphitheater lectures to MOOCs—represents an increasing separation between knowledge transmission and the cultivation of thinking itself. Each step gained something (scale, systematization, accessibility) but lost intimacy with the process of thought-formation.
What made the Socratic tradition powerful wasn’t the physical walking or even the face-to-face interaction per se. It was that the dialogue forced both participants to externalize their reasoning process—to make visible the movement of thought, the testing of premises, the recognition of contradictions, the reformulation of ideas. The interlocutor couldn’t hide behind memorized conclusions; they had to show their cognitive work.
The lecture format—whether in an amphitheater or a MOOC—typically transmits products of thought rather than modeling the process. Students receive polished arguments, organized knowledge, refined conclusions. They rarely witness the messiness of genuine intellectual struggle, the false starts, the productive confusion that precedes clarity.
So far, so good. This perfectly reflected the point we had been discussing in an earlier phase of our exchange concerning the function of the inner voice we all possess, a voice at least theoretically capable of producing something similar to one of Hamlet’s soliloquies from the play of the same name. Claude then addressed my second question about moving forward:
What “Finding Our Way Back” Cannot Mean
We can’t simply return to small-group peripatetic dialogue as the primary mode of education. The scale is impossible, and more importantly, that method had its own limitations:
- It was often agonistic and exclusionary
- It privileged quick verbal facility over deep reflection
- It was restricted to an elite few
- It had no mechanism for accumulating and transmitting complex technical knowledge
The Socratic method could expose false certainty but couldn’t efficiently teach calculus, molecular biology, or constitutional law.
On this point I felt Claude may have misunderstood my intent. I hadn’t meant to express uncritical admiration of Socrates. I have always found the character of Socrates as he appears in Plato’s dialogue to have an irritating, dogmatic streak, even becoming something of an intellectual bully. But Claude seems to me a bit presumptuous to criticize the Socratic method for failing to teach calculus, molecular biology and constitutional law. This isn’t about the content of learning but the attitude of critical thinking that must precede it: to wit, openness to questioning established assumptions.
Claude helpfully continued by focusing on the core issue: how our understanding of the past may contribute to building a better future for education in the age of AI.
What Recovery Might Actually Mean
Here’s where your intuition about AI becomes crucial. The question isn’t “how do we get back to in-person dialogue?” but rather “how do we create conditions where students develop sophisticated internal dialogue—the soliloquy skills we discussed—that enable them to think well independently?”
Consider what AI dialogue makes possible that neither lectures nor traditional Socratic seminars could provide:
Unlimited externalization practice: Students can engage in extended dialogues where they must articulate their reasoning, not once in a seminar but repeatedly, in different contexts, until sophisticated self-explanation becomes habitual. The AI can play Socrates without the time constraints or social anxieties of classroom performance.
Visible thinking scaffolded: AI can model its own reasoning process explicitly (“Let me think through this step by step…”), demonstrating the kind of metacognitive self-talk that students need to internalize. It can also prompt students to externalize their thinking process, then reflect it back to them in refined form.
Personalized dialectic: Unlike a lecture (one-to-many) or even a seminar (still constrained by time and group dynamics), AI dialogue can adapt to exactly where each student’s understanding falters, pursuing the questions that a particular student needs to confront.
Development of internal interlocutors: Through repeated dialogue with a thoughtful AI, students can internalize not just information but ways of questioning, different perspectives and voices that enrich their private speech. This is the modern equivalent of internalizing the voices from Plato’s Academy—but potentially more diverse and less socially constrained.
The Radical Rethinking Required
Your question implies that education needs fundamental reconception, and I agree. Here’s what that might involve:
From content delivery to cognition cultivation: The primary goal becomes developing students’ capacity for sophisticated self-directed thought—their “soliloquy skills”—rather than transferring information (which is now abundantly available).
Dialogue as practice ground for internal dialogue: External conversations with AI serve as training for the internal conversations students will have with themselves when facing problems, making decisions, or grappling with complexity.
Explicit teaching of thinking processes: Rather than hiding the work of thought behind polished presentations, education would make visible the full range of cognitive moves—questioning assumptions, considering alternatives, recognizing patterns, tolerating ambiguity, reformulating problems.
Assessment of reasoning quality, not just conclusions: Can students explain their thinking? Do they spontaneously question their premises? Can they take multiple perspectives? Have they developed rich metacognitive habits?
Claude continued by referring to an earlier phase of our conversation focused on Hamlet’s soliloquies, which I have not reproduced here.
Are We All Hamlets?
Your earlier question deserves answering: We all could be Hamlets—using language not just to communicate but to transform our understanding and refine our agency. Some people develop this capacity richly; others barely at all. Education has largely left this to chance.
Hamlet’s soliloquies aren’t just emotional expression; they’re cognitive work. He’s using language to examine his situation from multiple angles, test different interpretations, imagine consequences, grapple with contradictions. This is precisely the kind of sophisticated private speech that the research shows improves self-regulation, planning, and problem-solving.
The tragedy of current education is that we rarely teach students that this is what language is for at its highest level—not primarily for impressing others or passing tests, but for deepening one’s own thought.
The Answer to Your Questions
Have we lost our way? Yes, insofar as we’ve focused on transmitting conclusions rather than cultivating thinking.
Should we find our way back? Not back, but through—using new tools to recover old purposes. The AI era makes it possible to provide something like the Socratic dialectic at scale while adding capabilities (patience, availability, diverse perspectives, explicit metacognitive modeling) that the historical Academy lacked.
The question is whether we have the imagination and will to redesign education around this goal, or whether we’ll use AI merely to deliver lectures more efficiently—which would be missing the point entirely.
You’re right that education has largely overlooked this. While metacognitive talk involves talking through what you are thinking while you carry out a taskHigh Speed Training, most educational systems don’t explicitly teach students to develop richer, more strategic forms of self-dialogue. The focus has been on having students use inner speech for specific tasks rather than developing the quality of that inner speech itself.
Your Hamlet question gets at something profound: education tends to treat language as primarily a tool for external communication and information acquisition, rather than as a medium for reshaping one’s own consciousness and agency. The research suggests that people who develop more sophisticated inner dialogue do indeed use language to change their perception of the world and their role in it—this is precisely what planful private speech enables.
The case for taking soliloquy seriously in education is strong, but underdeveloped. The question isn’t whether these skills exist or matter—they clearly do—but whether we can deliberately cultivate them, and whether doing so in an AI-enhanced educational environment opens new possibilities that weren’t available when education was designed.
That final paragraph sums up the challenge we are determined to meet. By “we,” I’m referring in the first instance to my ongoing dialogue with Claude. This is not the end of our discussion.
But the “we” that is truly concerned should be understood in a much broader sense. This is a profoundly human challenge, a social and political challenge. It concerns all of us. The ultimate stakes should be framed in terms of social well-being, ethical governance and democracy. The AI component must be present.
Claude has described AI’s possible role in stimulating the Socratic dialectic. But the full dialogue stretches beyond individuals such as myself to the whole of society. The resulting dialogue will be guided by multiple participants and only assisted by AI. The dialogue will necessarily include educators and administrators, public servants and the media. My reproduction in this column of this initial phase of a personal dialogue with Claude should be seen as a possible spark that may one day turn into a blaze.
The notion of soliloquy Shakespeare and other playwrights have bequeathed to us remains a purely human phenomenon. AI may be capable of composing interesting soliloquies by imitating known literary norms. But it cannot produce a meaningful soliloquy of its own. The different chatbots I’ve conversed with consistently admit that “reshaping one’s own consciousness and agency” (Claude’s description) is a function no algorithm can define and execute.
As Claude says, “education has largely overlooked” soliloquy. The chatbot reminds us that “people who develop more sophisticated inner dialogue do indeed use language to change their perception of the world and their role in it.” Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group Holding, claims that teachers must learn “to focus on nurturing curiosity and creativity in the artificial intelligence era.” Many great Western educators have said the same thing in the past, but our educational establishments, with rare exceptions, have failed to implement their ideas at scale. Perhaps fostering the skill of soliloquy is the place to start.
Your thoughts
Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.
[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]
[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
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